“My Heart Is Dancing” — How an Iraqi Family
Found Refuge in Canada After Escaping
Persecution and Detention in the U.S.

By Ryan Devereaux

March 18, 2018 "Information
Clearing House" -Nothing about the Laredo
Processing Center’s physical appearance
immediately suggests it is run by a
multimillion-dollar, for-profit prison
corporation. Located just off the highway,
about 5 miles from the Rio Grande, the drab
one-story building, with its chain-link
fencing and razor wire, is sandwiched
between Ruben’s Paint and Body Shop and
Martinez Wrecker Services.

If not for the sign outside, the
immigrant detention center could easily be
mistaken for a well-guarded junkyard. For
the people locked inside, who sleep in open
areas crammed with bodies — if they are not
being held in isolation — days consist of
head counts, the echoing voices of shouting
guards, and a lot of waiting. If you’re
lucky, you have the money to make short
calls home and a loved one to pick up the
phone.

For Safaa Al Shakarchi, this was life for
more than a year. Along with his wife,
Zinah, and their two small children —
2-year-old Sidrah and 6-year-old Yousif —
Safaa crossed the bridge linking Reynosa,
Mexico, to McAllen, Texas, on January 14,
2017. Nearly six months had passed since the
family was expelled from their adopted home
in the United Arab Emirates. Zinah and Safaa
had been building a life in the Gulf nation
since 2009, when a militia commander in
Baghdad shot Zinah and murdered her
colleague, prompting her to flee Iraq.

In the months that followed the
expulsion, the family’s unwelcome odyssey
brought them to six countries, through
multiple times zones, and across numerous
borders. They endured detention at the hands
of Mexican authorities, including officials
who beat Safaa as his children watched, and
navigated some of the most treacherous
cartel-controlled territory in the Western
Hemisphere.

It was not the life they had planned, but
the family was at the mercy of forces beyond
their control. Passports in hand, the
Shakarchis presented themselves before U.S.
immigration officials in Texas. Invoking a
right enshrined in both U.S. and
international law, they applied for asylum.
While his wife and children were eventually
permitted to enter the country to begin the
asylum process, Safaa was not. After a long
and difficult experience, he ultimately
found himself locked up in Laredo, accused
of no crime, with deportation orders but no
country willing to accept him.

We met in a harshly lit, depressing
waiting room furnished with plastic
furniture, accessed via a darkened hallway.
The walls were painted a yellowish beige and
featured Corrections Corporation of America
promotional posters highlighting the “CCA
Way” and posters urging detainees to report
sexual abuse.

There was nobody else in the room when
the lock on the heavy metal door clicked. A
short guard in a shabby, two-tone blue
uniform, carrying a set of jingling keys and
a squawking radio, pushed it open and Safaa
walked in. Of medium height and build,
dressed in a dark blue prison jumpsuit with
salt-and-pepper hair, he stood tall as he
entered the visiting area, moving briskly
over the tile floor.

When we first spoke by phone, Safaa was
in the midst of his second hunger strike,
part of an effort to force the U.S.
government to resolve his case. He told me
that he had lost 22 pounds and that his
guards had forcibly placed him in isolation
for his protests, in a frigid cell where air
conditioning blasted over his bed. Later
that night, his wife told me Safaa had
started eating again. Guards had come into
his cell, she said, telling him that if he
did not eat, he would be sent to another
facility where he would be force-fed.

Safaa took his seat across from me,
folded his hands on the plastic table, and
smiled politely. Physically, at least, he
seemed to be relatively fine. But then he
began to speak. His voice was so small, so
depleted, that I could barely hear it. “I’m
tired of crying,” Safaa said, leaning
forward. No sooner had our conversation
begun than the guard who had opened the door
walked over to us. “Excuse me, sir,” he said
to me. “Give us a minute.” Safaa looked at
the guard, looked at me, then got up from
the table.

The door closed behind the two men. The
only sound was the radios crackling and the
voices carrying down the hall where they had
disappeared. Minutes later, Safaa returned.
When I asked why he had been removed, he
shrugged. Maybe they wanted to turn on a
recording device, he suggested. Mostly, that
was just the nature of being locked up —
guards make decisions, give you little or no
explanation, and you have to comply. “They
are bad,” Safaa said. “They are very fucking
bad.”

The interview was scheduled for 45
minutes. Before we began, I told Safaa that
I had spoken with Zinah, that she sent her
love, and that she wanted him to be strong.
He winced at the mention of his family. We
went over, again, the chronology of events
that landed him Laredo. He showed me the
folder where he kept the documents he had
gathered along the way, a sparse collection
of government papers that did little to
convey what his family had been through.

As we spoke, Safaa talked again and again
of the dehumanizing nature of his
confinement. “I want them to respect me. I’m
a human. I have kids,” he said. In
conversations on the phone, Yousif, who is
now 7, would ask his father why he wouldn’t
come home, and if it was because he didn’t
love him anymore. “What do I tell him?”
Safaa asked.

More than anything, Safaa explained, he
wanted to go home and do the things dads do.
“I have to take him to the mall,” he said of
his little boy. “I have to sit on the floor
and play with him.” Those moments are
important, Safaa stressed, and he was
missing out on all of them.

For Safaa, the reason behind his
continued detention was plain to see. The
guards, the facility itself, all of it was
about turning a profit. “They keep us here
for business,” Safaa said. He said it was a
scheme unparalleled in its cruel design,
calling it the “first dirty business in the
world.”

The door to the visiting room opened and
the guard informed us that we had just a few
minutes remaining. As we were packing up, I
noticed a piece of paper colored red, white,
and blue poking out of Safaa’s breast
pocket. It was his prison identification
document. He had colored it like an American
flag. “Because really, I love America,”
Safaa said, smiling. At the same time, he
added, “America kill me.”

The subject line of the email
read: “Urgent need help please.”

Zinah Al Shakarchi sent it to the
Intercept tips address at 5:30 a.m. on
January 7. She described how her husband was
in detention, on hunger strike, and how she
had reached out to every legal organization
she could find to no avail. She described
how her young son was in a “bad psychic
condition,” crying all the time and trying
to hurt himself.

“He think if he will hurt himself, his
father will come to see him,” she wrote.

When we first spoke two days later, Zinah
described how her family had ended up in
their situation. In the weeks that followed,
we spoke frequently as Zinah navigated the
complexities of U.S. immigration law.
Throughout the process, she provided every
piece of paper she could find to corroborate
her family’s account, including government
records from Mexico, the United States, and
Canada, where she and her two young children
are currently living.

The narrative that emerged from those
conversations and documents reveals how a
man who has never been accused, charged, or
convicted of a crime in the U.S. nonetheless
found himself in indefinite detention on
American soil — and the remarkable lengths
his family went to in order to get him back.

he story begins more than seven
years ago, in Baghdad.

As part of a quality-control team with
the Ministry of Trade, Zinah inspected food
coming into the country before it was
transferred to local retailers. In June
2009, she was inspecting a container of
sugar when she detected the smell of
gasoline. She informed her manager that the
shipment could not be approved.

While her decision might seem
straightforward enough, little in Baghdad,
by that time, was that simple. In the years
since the U.S. invasion, an array of armed
groups had filled the power vacuum left by
Saddam Hussein, grappling for money and
territorial control. Later that day,
fighters linked to the Jaysh al-Mahdi
militia showed up at Zinah’s receiving area
demanding that she let the sugar shipment
through. The fighters shouted, pointing out
to Zinah that she was a woman. Zinah was
unfazed. The receiving area was her domain,
and if she said a shipment wasn’t going
through, it wasn’t going through. She yelled
back, telling the fighters to leave.

The commander told Zinah that she would
suffer the rest of her life for the decision
she made that day. “You will see, crazy
woman,” he said.

That afternoon, as Zinah was leaving
work, the militia made good on its threat.
At first, she said, she didn’t feel the
gunshot. Then she noticed the blood pumping
from her right arm. The wound was shallow,
and Zinah managed to flee the scene and make
it to a hospital. The terror, however, had
not subsided. When she returned to the
office two days later to check in with
friends and colleagues, Zinah encountered
the distressed father of one her co-workers
— his daughter, a woman named Jenan, had not
returned from work the previous day.

Jenan had been kidnapped from the
receiving area the day after Zinah’s
confrontation with the militia. Her body,
bearing evidence of torture, was found in a
garbage bin the following day. In the
aftermath of the murder, Zinah said her
manager encouraged her to take an extended
leave of absence, reminding her that she was
an unmarried virgin, and that the men she
was up against were capable of anything.

Hiding out and nursing her injury, Zinah
was visited by her second cousin Safaa. For
six years, Safaa had been living in the UAE,
and like Zinah, his life had been touched by
violence. In 2003, after a series of clashes
with powerful figures in the Baath party,
Safaa said he had helped prevent the
kidnapping of a Christian neighbor’s
daughters by Saddam’s sadistic son Uday. He
soon fled the country.

In 2006, while Safaa was in the UAE,
Iraqi militants kidnapped his first wife,
who was an employee with the Ministry of
Defense and the daughter of an Iraqi general
working with U.S. forces at the time. She
escaped her captors by throwing herself out
of a moving vehicle. Safaa said the brush
with death left the mother of his first
three children with long-lasting
psychological scars. In 2009, she asked for
a divorce and subsequently moved to the U.S.
with the children.

During his visit in Baghdad, Safaa
listened as Zinah explained what had
happened with the sugar shipment. When he
returned home that night, he found himself
unable to sleep. His mind turned to his
ex-wife, what she had endured, and the toll
it had taken. Zinah would not stand down, he
reasoned, no matter the threat.
Unfortunately, neither would the militia.
When Safaa awoke the next morning, he made a
decision. He called his office in Abu Dhabi
and said he needed a few more days in
Baghdad. He then headed back to Zinah’s home
and asked her to marry him.

Zinah was surprised. She asked Safaa if
he was asking because he was afraid for her.
No, he said, it was because she was a brave
woman. Zinah liked the answer. A week later,
the pair were married at Zinah’s home, her
arm still bandaged, and soon after, they
left to start a life together in the
Emirates.

“It’s a love story,” Zinah told me,
quietly laughing as she remembered those
early days — nothing like the hell the
family was living through now.

The years that followed were happy and
stable, Zinah said. Safaa had a solid job as
a maintenance manager in Abu Dhabi with some
300 employees under his supervision. Zinah
eventually found work as a medical lab
technician.

Once or twice a year, Zinah would return
to Iraq to renew her leave from work. Each
time, it seemed the situation on the ground
had only gotten worse. During one visit,
Zinah came home to find her “friends were
disappearing and the honest people were
being killed.” When she arranged plans for a
visit in 2013, a friend informed her that
the militia commander she confronted had
only grown in power — and he had not
forgotten the woman who yelled at him in
front of his men.

Safaa, too, experienced his share of
troubles in visits to Iraq, including a 2012
run-in with al Hakeem militia members that
led to a beating and death threats. When
Safaa returned the following year, those
threats persisted. He was told that if he
ever returned, he would be killed.

In February 2016, the Shakarchis planned
a 20-day visit to their home country.
Safaa’s sister was getting married, and
skipping her ceremony was out of the
question. Four days after arriving in Iraq,
Safaa walked outside to find an envelope on
his car. Inside was a bullet. The message
was clear: Leave Iraq now, or die.

The family flew out the next day. After
so many weeks preparing for the wedding,
they didn’t even have the time to say
goodbye to their family and friends. It was
the last time the family set foot in Iraq.

Leaving forever was difficult, but
life was good in the UAE. Then, in the
summer of 2016, everything came crashing
down.

It was the holy month of Ramadan and the
Shakarchis were five minutes away from
breaking their fast when the phone rang. The
voice on the other end of the line belonged
to an official from the Criminal
Investigation Department in Abu Dhabi. They
wanted Safaa to come to their office, with
his passport.

The call wasn’t exactly a surprise. The
Shakarchis are Shia, and in recent years,
the UAE has systematically expelled
thousands of Shia Muslims from numerous
countries — including Pakistan, Syria,
Lebanon, and Iraq. During his 13 years in
the UAE, Safaa had done what he could to
ward off potential displacement. He stopped
going to the mosque and bought alcohol with
his credit card in hopes of sending a
message to the UAE’s formidable surveillance
state that he was not religious. All that
mattered to him, he later said, was his
family, his job, and “fishing sometime in
the sea in the end of the week.”

Safaa knew he was fighting an uphill
battle. Three years earlier, his brother had
been expelled from the UAE, so when Safaa
visited the CID office, he left his passport
behind. The office canceled Safaa’s visa
electronically nonetheless, invalidating the
family’s legal status in the country. They
were given 24 hours to leave. The timing was
terrible. Sidrah was in the hospital at the
time, suffering from a severe asthma attack.
According to the Shakarchis, the doctor
overseeing Sidrah’s care pushed back on the
expulsion. Then the doctor herself got a
phone call from the government: If she
didn’t release the girl, she would be
expelled as well.

Forced to pay a fine for their delayed
departure, Safaa and Zinah had no idea what
to do. Iraq was obviously a no-go. Not only
were there pre-existing threats, but just
days before the family was expelled, the
Islamic State launched a massive,
coordinated bomb attack in Safaa’s old
neighborhood — hundreds of people were
killed. Ultimately, the family decided to
fly to Georgia, in Eastern Europe, where as
Iraqi citizens they could stay for 30 days.
After nearly three weeks, the Shakarchis
flew to Malaysia, which was also offering
30-day stays for Iraqis from the Gulf. From
Malaysia, they flew to Japan, and from
there, to Mexico City, where they had valid
tourist visas. The Shakarchis landed in
Mexico City on August 28, 2016.

Immediately after their plane touched
down, Zinah and Safaa said, Mexican
immigration officials confiscated their
phones and passports, telling them they
could not enter the country because Safaa
had previously applied for a U.S. visa. The
family protested, asking why, if they were
not permitted to enter the country, had the
government granted them tourist visas? For
six days, they waited in the airport. All
the while, 3-year-old Sidrah, who had been
pulled out of her medical treatment early,
became increasingly ill.

During their search of the Shakarchis’
belongings, the Mexican officials had failed
to uncover a cellphone tucked away in a bag
that contained Sidrah’s diapers and baby
supplies. Safaa used the phone to snap a
series of photos of the room where they were
being held. Connecting to airport Wi-Fi,
Zinah sent the photos to her brother, who in
turn got the images to an Iraqi consular
official in Mexico City, who began asking
questions of his Mexican counterparts.

That night, Mexican authorities
approached Safaa, demanding that he turn
over the phone and explaining that he needed
to come with them. It was nearly midnight
and Safaa was afraid — he’d heard about
kidnappings in Mexico and people who
disappeared and never came back. He refused
to go. The officials punched him and kicked
him as his children looked on. The beating
aggravated an old back injury, leaving Safaa
paralyzed with pain on the airport floor.

A doctor was called to the scene, Safaa
was given an injection, and the family was
relocated to an off-site immigration
detention center in Mexico City, where they
remained for nearly two weeks, until the
arrival of a group of English-speaking human
rights workers. Throughout the ordeal, Zinah
had pleaded with Mexican officials, telling
them her daughter’s asthma was worsening and
that she needed medical care.

The human rights workers agreed the
Shakarchis’ detention was unlawful, and that
Sidrah urgently needed medical attention.
The following day, they returned with a
doctor and a lawyer. The Shakarchis were
told that if they signed paperwork applying
for refugee status with Mexico’s Commission
for Refugee Assistance, known as COMAR, they
could be released. They did so and were soon
moved to a facility run by a resettlement
organization in Mexico City.

In the four months that followed, the
family was provided temporary shelter by the
organization as they applied for asylum in
Mexico. Without authorization to work, Safaa
and Zinah became desperate. In November, the
family received a letter from Mexican
immigration authorities, written in Spanish
and laden with legal jargon, indicating that
while COMAR considered them refugees, their
petition to regularize their immigration
status on the basis of family bonds was
inadmissible. They had until early January
to figure out what to do. Homelessness in
Mexico was not an option, so they decided to
fly north, to the city of Reynosa.

Situated across the border from Texas, in
the state of Tamaulipas, Reynosa is among
the most dangerous cities in Mexico, a place
where kidnappings for ransom are common,
organized crime reigns, and murders go
unsolved. The Shakarchis were aware of the
risks they faced when they landed at the
airport on January 14, 2017. They grabbed a
taxi and asked the driver to take them
straight to the U.S. port of entry. Two
hundred pesos, he said. The family agreed.
Pulling up to the bridge, the driver
informed Safaa that the fee would actually
be $200 — about 20 times the initial price.

It was either that, the driver said, or
“I’ll take you to someone else.” Terrified,
Safaa paid the money and the family began
their walk to the border.

All through 2016, as the Shakarchi
family searched for a place to live, a storm
of anti-immigrant sentiment was swirling
around the world. In the U.S., the movement
was embodied by Donald Trump’s successful
presidential bid. Trump’s vows to restore
law and order were a hit with the people
tasked with securing the border and
maintaining the nation’s sprawling
immigration enforcement apparatus.
Ironically, they also appeared to embolden
some potentially unlawful activity. A month
after his election, the Washington Post
reported a dramatic rise in
asylum-seekers turned away at the southern
border without cause — those claims were
later amplified in multiple
human rights reports and are now the
subject of a major
class-action lawsuit.

This was the political context Safaa,
Zinah, and their children were walking into
as they crossed the bridge into McAllen. As
it happened, though, they weren’t turned
away at the border. Instead, Safaa
ultimately landed at the Laredo Processing
Center. Zinah and the kids, meanwhile, were
placed in the South Texas Family Residential
Center, a behemoth facility in Dilley,
Texas, set up by the Obama administration to
house mothers and children during a surge of
Central Americans to the U.S. Both
facilities are operated by CoreCivic,
formerly known as Corrections Corporation of
America, the nation’s second-largest private
prison corporation.

When a person comes to the U.S. seeking
asylum, the first step in the process
generally involves a conversation with a
Customs and Border Protection officer, who
will ask the individual if they fear being
returned to their home country. If the
answer is yes, the individual will then
receive a credible fear interview. Typically
administered by an asylum officer with U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services, the
interview is intended to more concretely
determine whether a person has a credible
fear of being persecuted or tortured upon
return to their home country. If the
individual passes that interview, the case
will then go before a judge, who will
determine whether or not to grant asylum.

The duration of the asylum process can
vary, and in the past, asylum-seekers were
often released as their cases moved through
the system. Under Trump, however, the number
of asylum-seekers granted parole has fallen
dramatically.

The Shakarchis both passed their credible
fear interviews. While Zinah had no
complaints about the conditions at the
center in Dilley, detention was difficult.
It took time just to figure out where Safaa
was being held. When she finally reached him
by telephone, she was in tears. “Just be
patient,” Safaa said, telling his wife they
would be reunited soon.

Zinah and the children were released on
parole after 12 days in detention, their
case still open. They traveled to Dallas,
where Safaa’s brother lives. He helped them
find a cheap apartment and a car to get
around. Based on conversations with U.S.
officials at the border, Zinah expected her
husband would be a couple of weeks behind
her in his release.

Yet those weeks turned into months. The
little news Zinah received about Safaa’s
situation was not good. According to the
family, Immigration and Customs Enforcement
denied Safaa parole in April because he
could not prove that he was not a flight
risk. An ICE supervisor also denied a
$25,000 bond recommendation from one of his
subordinates, the family says, because of
Safaa’s nationality and religion.

On July 26, 2017, after more than seven
months in detention, Safaa had his asylum
hearing before an immigration judge. In
years past, Laredo detainees would have
their immigration hearings via
teleconference with a judge in San Antonio.
That changed following Trump’s inauguration.
Under the new administration, a surge of
judges was sent to the border in one- to
two-week stints. Laredo set up face-to-face
immigration hearings, overseen by a security
guard, in March.

The increased number of judges was
designed to churn through the tide of
purportedly dangerous migrants streaming
across the border that Trump had warned
about on the campaign trail. But after Trump
was elected, Border Patrol apprehensions,
the metric the government uses to gauge
the flow of illegal border crossings,
dropped to levels not seen since the 1970s,
leaving so-called detail judges in many
courts with little to do.

In October, while Safaa was still in
detention, a pair of reporters from the
Marshall Project and “This American Life”
visited the court and found the disarray
there was beyond anything else seen in the
wake of Trump’s surge in judges. The
joint report, published in January, also
highlighted the work of Paola Marielle
Tostado, a 25-year-old immigration attorney,
two years out of law school, who was
described as “a real Texas highway rider
lawyer from Brownsville” who “announced her
presence with a scarlet dress and 4-inch
spike heels.”

The Shakarchis hired Tostado to represent
Safaa. Their aim was asylum and preventing
Safaa’s deportation to Iraq. It did not go
well

he detail judge in Safaa’s hearing
was Glen R. Baker. Appointed by the Obama
administration in 2014, Baker normally
presides over the Kansas City immigration
court. According to the
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or
TRAC, a research center at Syracuse
University, from 2012 through 2017, Baker
had an asylum denial rate of 71.3 percent,
placing him above the national average of
52.8 percent.

According to audio obtained by The
Intercept, the hearing was initially
attended by Safaa, Tostado, Baker, and a
guard watching over the proceedings. The
hearing was also facilitated by an Arabic
translator who teleconferenced in. The
addition of the translator, whose dialect
was Egyptian, seemed to complicate the
conversation, rather than improve it. The
audio connection was poor, and after a
garbled translation of one of his answers
about life under Saddam Hussein, Safaa
volunteered to answer questions in his
limited English.

Geographically, Safaa’s story placed him
apart from the asylum cases Baker normally
handles. In recent years, TRAC data shows,
just 1.2 percent of asylum-seekers appearing
before Baker came from a Middle Eastern
country. “Is Abu Dhabi a city or a country?”
Baker asked Safaa. It is the capital, Safaa
replied.

Safaa answered a series of questions from
Tostado, explaining the 14-year saga that
brought him from Baghdad to Laredo. In
addition to Safaa’s repeated visits to Iraq,
Baker homed in on a line of questioning
related to the Shakarchis’ time in Mexico.
Tostado had noted that while they were in
Mexico, the family had applied for asylum
and been granted refugee status. “In Mexico,
when you’re a refugee, you cannot work,” she
explained, pointing to Mexican documents the
Shakarchis had received, “so they applied
for work authorization and that was denied.”

By that point, a lawyer for the
government, ICE attorney Emmanuel Garcia,
had arrived. Garcia agreed the materials in
question showed that the family had been
approved as refugees, and that “the Mexican
government was already telling them, ‘You
have refugee status. If you want to obtain a
different legal status in this country, all
you have to do is apply for humanitarian
reasons.’” The problem, he speculated, was
“that whatever they were applying was maybe
perhaps not the right application or not the
correct type of relief that they should have
sought from the government.”

For Baker, the point was critical. If the
Shakarchis were granted status in another
country, then they were barred from asylum
in the U.S. Safaa and Tostado argued that
the family did file for an adjustment in
their status that would allow them to work
in Mexico. Safaa said the process was
supposed to take two weeks, but he waited
two months and heard nothing. Eventually, it
got to the point where the family could no
longer stay in the shelter, nor could they
work and feed their children, thus prompting
them to make the trip to the U.S.

None of that mattered in the view of the
court. Safaa’s opportunity for asylum
collapsed, leaving a withholding of removal
to Iraq as his only hope for a positive
outcome.

After a brutal cross-examination by the
ICE attorney, during which Safaa appeared
unable to follow many of the questions,
Baker announced his decision, which was
about as far from the Shakarchis’ hopes as
it could get. He dismissed Safaa’s asylum
claim on account of the family’s status in
Mexico and his conclusion that Safaa did not
fit into any of the five protected groups
that qualify for asylum under U.S. law.
Similarly, he concluded, the United Nations
convention against torture did not apply in
Safaa’s case. “Now, your wife may have a
claim, I don’t think she has a claim for
asylum because she was granted relief in
Mexico, but she may have a claim for
withholding of removal,” he told Safaa.

Critically, Baker added, “withholding of
removal applications are singular. She has
her application, you have yours, and if she
is granted relief, it doesn’t help your
case.” The judge ordered Safaa to be
deported to either Mexico or Iraq. He
informed the family that they had the right
to appeal but added that the process would
likely mean at least five more months in
detention. “I do not have authority to let
you out in the meantime, while you wait for
your appeal to be decided, because you’re
classified as an arriving alien,” he said.

“The immigration law of the United States
does not encompass all treatment that
society regards as unfair, unjust, or even
unlawful or unconstitutional,” Baker went on
to say. “I know this isn’t the outcome that
you were hoping for, but I’ve done my best
to apply the law to your case, and I believe
it’s the correct decision”

“Good luck to you, sir,” the judge told
Safaa. “Good luck to you, ma’am,” he said to
Zinah. “That’s all for today.”

Safaa was returned to detention. On
August 13, the Shakarchis say they submitted
a request to ICE for an appeal document and
other materials related to his case. On
August 25, the day the appeal needed to be
filed, ICE responded, the family says,
asking what documents Safaa required.

In the end, no appeal was filed.

It seemed there was nowhere in the world
the Shakarchis could be together, and that
the most powerful government on the planet
was bent on keeping it that way.

Day after day, Safaa was tormented by the
idea that he would be sent to a war zone, a
place he hadn’t lived for more than a
decade, that he wouldn’t be able to see his
children grow up, and that it was all
because he came to the U.S. looking for
help. To him, it felt like an unfathomably
cruel punishment for an eminently
understandable act.

Safaa bonded with the men in his hall,
who came from all over the world. He thought
a lot about private prisons, calculating how
much money the whole operation must be
making. But mostly, he slept. It was the
only way to turn off the world around him.
As time went on, his thoughts grew darker.
Sitting across the table in the Laredo
detention center, he told me he had no doubt
that he would be killed if he were sent back
to Iraq. But even that, he said, would be
preferable to the unending limbo he had
found himself in.

The meetings with ICE were particularly
difficult, Safaa said, full of raised
expectations and dashed hopes. “They just
lie, lie, lie,” he said.

With their attorney gone and their
savings dwindling, Zinah took it upon
herself to become Safaa’s primary advocate
and made understanding his options her
full-time job — this on top of raising two
young children on her own in a country she
did not know.

From outside the detention center walls,
she struggled with the faceless
bureaucrats who kept Safaa locked up. She
would call his deportation officer over and
over, pressing him to find a resolution in
the case. She contacted every legal
organization she could find. It seemed
nobody had the time or the resources to
help. In a country where the immigration
court backlog includes more than 650,000
cases, it’s not difficult to understand why.

Zinah read about a lawsuit known as
Hamama v. Adducci that seemed promising at
first. The case has its roots in Trump’s ban
on travelers coming to the U.S. from seven
Muslim-majority nations, which initially
included Iraq. In years past, the U.S.
government struggled to deport people to
Iraq, in part because of the country’s
refusal to issue the necessary travel
documents. That changed with the travel ban.

Following negotiations with the
administration, the Iraqi government agreed
in March to begin accepting deported
citizens in exchange for removal from
Trump’s list. Three months later, ICE
launched a series of operations targeting
Iraqis with prior removal orders. A total of
234 Iraqis were arrested; more than 1,210
others became official targets for
deportation.

The Iraqis in ICE’s crosshairs had, for
the most part, been living in the U.S. for
years under government supervision and
included a significant number of Iraqi
Christians. The sweeps prompted a
class-action lawsuit filed by the American
Civil Liberties Union, with the organization
arguing its clients be permitted to have
their cases heard before an immigration
judge, on the grounds that their swift
deportation would expose them to
persecution, torture, and possible death
upon their return to Iraq.

Hamama v. Adducci was filed in Michigan
because much of ICE’s enforcement efforts
were concentrated there. The case took on
national significance in July, when U.S.
District Judge Mark Goldsmith issued a
nationwide stay of removal temporarily
protecting Iraqis swept up in ICE’s
operations. According to Margo Schlanger, a
former Department of Homeland Security chief
of civil rights and civil liberties who is
now a professor at University of Michigan
Law School and an attorney on the Hamama
suit, Safaa just barely missed the deadline
to be included in the class-action suit.

Still, she added, his case could raise
important questions in the ongoing
litigation.

Both the Shakarchis and Tostado said
ICE’s efforts to deport Safaa to Iraq were
hampered by Iraq’s refusal to accept him.
The reason why is unclear. Despite receiving
a detailed list of questions, the only
comment ICE would make to me about Safaa’s
case was to confirm that he was being
detained. The Iraqi embassy did not respond
to repeated requests for clarification;
whether ICE made any headway in negotiations
with Mexican government is similarly
uncertain. In recent filings in the Hamama
case, however, government witnesses argued
that ICE’s “only impediment” to deporting
people to Iraq was Goldsmith’s current
injunction. Safaa was not protected by the
injunction, meaning that if the government’s
representations to the court were accurate,
ICE should have had no trouble deporting
him, but that didn’t happen.

Schlanger said Safaa’s case speaks to a
deeper murkiness around the ICE-Iraq
relationship and the “breakthrough” deal the
administration reached to remove Iraq from
Trump’s list. “The agreement that they’re
talking about, this breakthrough, whenever
we try to pin it down, the government
refuses to disclose any of the terms,”
Schlanger said. “We don’t really know who
they can remove, how many they can remove,
under what conditions they can remove them —
we just don’t know.”

That Safaa’s case could prompt changes or
new disclosures in the Hamama litigation was
of little use to Zinah. The lawsuit offered
no protections for Safaa, and that was all
that mattered to her.

Feeling she had exhausted all of her
options, Zinah decided to take the children
to Canada. She hoped doing so might provide
the Americans with a viable location for
Safaa’s deportation, but it also meant
abandoning her open asylum case in the U.S.
along the way.

She booked a flight to Boston, and from
there she and the kids traveled to
Plattsburgh, New York. Following a route
that’s become popular among asylum-seekers
since Trump’s inauguration, Zinah and the
children crossed the border into Quebec on
August 14 and applied for asylum.

The family first stayed in a cluster of
tents shared with other asylum-seekers, many
of them Haitians, who had also left the U.S.
Shortly after arriving, Zinah suffered an
asthma attack and was hospitalized. The
family was eventually moved into a shelter
and later an apartment. They were provided a
lawyer and financial assistance. Yousif was
enrolled in school and Sidrah in day care.

In October, a week before her court
hearing on her asylum case, Zinah learned
that her file had been transferred to
Toronto. Once again, she packed up the kids.
This time, they landed in Mississauga, a
Toronto suburb. With the help of an Arabic
Facebook group, made up of many similarly
displaced Iraqis, Zinah found a basement
apartment and a car to drive. In general,
Zinah said, the Canadians seemed more
accommodating and friendly than their
American counterparts. “It is more kind,”
she said.

A fan of American movies, Zinah once told
me her life felt like one, albeit a more
agonizing and never-ending film than she’d
ever care to see. For her, the whole ordeal
simply did not make sense. Safaa had done
nothing wrong, she would tell me, and yet he
was being punished so severely. “It’s not
human,” she said. “It’s not American.”

On at least the second point, Zinah
seemed somewhat mistaken.

The Shakarchis lay much of the blame for
what happened on Tostado, their former
attorney, for failing to mount a vigorous
defense and disappearing on them once
Safaa’s hearing was through. “She kill me,”
Safaa said of her representation. “She just
take the money and give me deportation and
gone,” he said. “I call, call, call her and
she not answer.”

In a phone call in January, Tostado told
me she met with Safaa “more than 10 times”
before his hearing, though she declined to
go into much detail about the case.
Consistent with the Shakarchis’ claims that
she was unresponsive, Tostado’s office did
not respond to repeated emails and phone
calls for further comment and clarifications
following that initial conversation.

It was true that Tostado appeared
outmatched by ICE’s more experienced
attorney, at least in the recordings that I
obtained. It was also true that she seemed
to vanish when the family was in desperate
need of ongoing representation. But to pin
the entire outcome on her would be to miss
the bigger picture of what families like the
Shakarchis are up against, and to see
Safaa’s case as something inconsistent with
U.S. practices would be a mistake.

Roughly 70 percent of ICE’s detention
facilities are run by private companies. By
law, the agency is required to meet a quota
of 34,000 detention beds filled each day.
Under Trump, ICE has sought to bump that
number up to 51,000 — a more than tenfold
increase from the roughly 5,000 immigrants
detained daily in 1994. Unfortunately for
families like the Shakarchis, the system
that funnels people into these centers is
functional only in the sense that it
continues to persist. It is a system in
which people routinely wait months, or even
years, before learning whether they will be
able to resume their lives again, and where
legal representation is not a given.
As Baker, the judge, pointed out, it is not
a system concerned with the messy and often
unfair realities of human lives. It is a
system of laws and, as it turns out, the
laws in the U.S. are quite harsh. Often, the
best a family can hope for is a bit of luck.

One day, after a series of phone calls
failed to connect her with a live human
being, Zinah decided she had had enough.
She wrote an email to Safaa’s deportation
officer. Zoo animals were given better
treatment than her family had received, she
told him. To Zinah’s surprise, when she
called the detention center later that day,
ICE told her that it was giving the Iraqi
embassy one more week to make a
determination. If the embassy failed to do
so, there was a chance Safaa would be
released.

Zinah’s hopes were soaring when, two days
later, Safaa received an envelope from the
Executive Office of Immigration Review, or
EOIR, the branch of the Justice Department
that oversees the nation’s immigration
courts. Obtaining a full record of Safaa’s
hearing had become a focus for both of us.
The Shakarchis hoped it would show that
their case was mishandled. I wanted to
confirm exactly what was said in the
proceeding, though I had my doubts about
whether it would make a difference in
Safaa’s situation. We both filed freedom of
information requests with the EOIR.

After weeks of waiting, Safaa opened the
envelope only to find a set of papers the
family already had. For Zinah, it was
another demoralizing blow. The horror movie
of their lives seemed to be rolling on. Days
later, she texted to see if there was any
news on my efforts to obtain the file. There
wasn’t, but before I could reply, another
message from Zinah came through.

“They let Safaa go,” it read.

t was gray, overcast, and
dribbling rain when Safaa landed in New York
City. He wore a black fleece, a puffy winter
coat, and blue jeans. His luggage was
minimal, just a rolling suitcase and a small
bag. The same things he carried when he,
Zinah, and the kids crossed the Mexican
border into the U.S. more than one year ago.

Standing outside LaGuardia Airport
waiting for a taxi, Safaa spoke on his
cellphone. Earlier in the day, Zinah had
connected with a network of American
activists working along the U.S. border with
Canada, who had offered to put Safaa in
touch with a driver he could trust once he
got into town. The driver was now on the
other end of the line. Safaa explained that
he would be arriving late. It didn’t matter,
the driver said, whatever time you get in,
I’ll be there. Just call.

The decision had come suddenly and
without explanation, Safaa explained, as we
settled into a cab bound for the bus
station.

On the morning of February 20, he was
told that his case manager wanted to speak
to him. He changed clothes and met with the
manager, who informed him that ICE had
requested a meeting. “What do they want?”
Safaa asked. “I don’t know,” his case
manager replied. The conversation with ICE
began with the normal pleasantries — “How
are you?” “How’s your health?” — then, Safaa
recalled, the officials told him, “We have a
surprise for you.”

Safaa’s first response to the news that
he was being released was denial. He had
lost hope in the days leading up to the
meeting. “I will not go from this place,” he
had told himself. “I will die here.” He was
trying to learn to forget the outside world.
“Excuse me, sir. I don’t want any more lie,”
Safaa told the officials. “I’m tired.” It
was no lie, the officials explained. Safaa
broke down. “I couldn’t catch myself,” he
said.

At that point, things moved quickly. Over
the next two hours, Safaa packed his
belongings and said goodbye to the men he
had befriended inside. It had been “one
year, one month, one week exactly.” During
that time, he and a handful of others had
become the longest-running detainees in
Laredo. There was a perception that they
would never be let out.

Once word spread among the 76 other
detainees that he was leaving, Safaa said,
there was an explosion of cheering,
laughter, and hugs. “Inside, we are like
family,” he said. Any time anyone got out,
even if it was through deportation, there
was a sense of relief and celebration. The
reason, he explained, is because to enter
the detention center is to see one’s life
come to a stop. When they go out, Safaa
said, “it starts again.”

Safaa was given a bus ticket to Dallas,
where his brother lives. He spent the
following two days in tearful phone
conversations with family members across the
world, confirming that, yes, in fact, he was
free. The terms of his release were laid out
in a two-page DHS “Order of Supervision”
form. The document explained that, because
he had not been deported in the time
prescribed by the law, he was being released
under the condition that he attended routine
ICE check-ins. It added that he could not
leave the state of Texas for more than 48
hours without providing notification to ICE.

When Safaa arrived in Dallas, his older
brother, whom he considers a father figure,
implored him to stay longer. It had been
years since they had seen each other. But
for Safaa, the road ahead was clear. “I want
to be with my wife and my kids,” he told me
as the cab pulled out of the airport. “I
want to be with my kids as a father; this is
my last job in the life.”

Safaa was beaming as the taxi made its
way into Manhattan, under the shadow of
high-rise buildings disappearing into the
storm clouds above. “Am I dreaming?” he
asked. He seemed an entirely different
person from the man I met in Laredo. He
couldn’t stop grinning. His voice had
returned. Passing through the Queens Midtown
tunnel, Safaa marveled at his wife’s
resiliency and tenacity over the last year.
“She work like a lawyer,” he said, a broad
smile spreading across his face. “She knows
everything.”

Back in the Emirates, Safaa explained,
Zinah didn’t pump gas into the car. Now,
Safaa said, she could not only refuel a
vehicle, she could drive it in the snow and
navigate the complexities of immigration law
in multiple countries. “Now, really, she
knows many things,” Safaa said. “God made me
far away from her to make her stronger in
life,” he added with a laugh.

The plan Safaa and Zinah concocted was
not without risk. There were recent reports
of Border Patrol agents stepping up searches
on northbound buses and trains. Safaa’s
intentions could not be shaken though. He
approached the bus kiosk in Manhattan. One
way or round trip? the attendant asked.

“One way,” Safaa replied.

His destination was Plattsburgh, the same
border city that Zinah and the children had
passed through months earlier. If he was
nervous about the voyage ahead, he wouldn’t
admit it, and he certainly wouldn’t show it.
Standing outside the bus terminal, the
lights of Midtown coloring his face, Safaa
pulled out a cigarette and placed it between
his lips. He tilted his head back with a
grin. “One year, one month, one week,” he
said. “No cigarette.”

undreds of miles away, in
Mississauga, Zinah waited anxiously.

“I can’t believe it!” she had exclaimed
over the phone on the day Safaa was
released. “He’s in the bus station,” she
said. “My heart right now is pumping too
much.” She called it “the happiest day in
all of my life.”

Safaa delivered the news of his release
by video call from the bus and spoke with
his children, but Zinah had decided not to
tell them of the Canada plan. They had
already been through so much, she couldn’t
bear disappointing them again. And so Zinah
waited and prayed. She had long planned to
renew their wedding vows if ever they were
reunited. Now, it seemed, that day was
coming.

It was well after dark when Safaa made it
out of the U.S. He was surrounded by other
migrants, many of them Africans, also
seeking sanctuary in Canada. As is customary
on the border, Canadian officials had
informed Safaa that if he crossed the line,
he would be in violation of Canadian law and
arrested. “I not have another choice,” Safaa
said, and crossed. “Welcome,” he was told.

“My heart is dancing,” Zinah wrote in a
text message early the next morning. Safaa had
made it to Quebec, she explained, and
would get to Mississauga in the wee hours of
the morning. What Zinah didn’t know was that
Safaa was already in a cab, making his way
to her as fast as he could. For Zinah, the
hours were dragging like never before. “Time
is not moving,” she said in a text. Then, at
12:43 a.m., she sent a series of photos. The
first was Zinah sliding a wedding band onto
Safaa’s finger. The second was Zinah resting
her head on Safaa’s chest. The final photo,
a glowing image of Safaa holding Sidrah and
Yousif in his arms, included a caption.
“Finally,” it said. “We did it.”

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